Why Baseball Shouldn't Use More Video Replay

Last week Bud Selig announced that Major League Baseball would be radically expanding its use of video replay. Since 2008, MLB has been allowing video replay for boundary calls like home runs, but now managers will have the opportunity to challenge safe-or-out calls and fair-or-foul calls up to three times a game. The response to the commissioner's decision has been overwhelmingly positive from the umpires, the fans, the players, and journalists. Ian Crouch at the New Yorkerthinks replays in baseball will more closely resemble football than basketball: "When a game turns on the theatre of the review, baseball will have revealed a new kind of drama to fans, one made even sweeter because it is backed by the truth." The main source of criticism, like Jay Jaffe's over at Sports Illustrated, seems to be that the measures don't go far enough. At first of course it's impossible to argue agains the use of video replay; it will, without question, result in fairer outcomes to games. But baseball is something more than a bunch of games. Baseball is a metaphor. And video replay ruins baseball's perfect metaphor of justice, which has worked for over a hundred years.

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The humanity of the decision-making in baseball is one of its most attractive features. The game shows, on a highly visible platform and in the most basic way imaginable, how judgments are made. And the fallibility of those judgments is one of the game's most important gifts. Baseball is an agrarian sport, beloved by urbanites. Wrigley Field is so beautiful because it's a field of grass in the middle of Chicago. Video replay completely destroys that nineteenth-century connection. Blown calls are part of baseball, and always have been. Blown calls are part of being human, and that is why we need to see them in our games.

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Stanley Fish, the eminent literary critic, has a famous baseball story that he often uses. A pitcher pitches a fastball. The batter doesn't swing and the umpire doesn't say anything. The pitcher looks back at the umpire and asks, "Well, was it a ball or strike?" And the umpire says, "It ain't nothing until I decide." Fish uses the story as a parable to describe the condition of the "always already" in Derridean deconstruction, but for everyone else it's just a great story about the arbitrariness of human judgment, how decisions that can look so natural in hindsight are really made by people in time. Fortunately, this story isn't ruined quite yet. The expansion of video replay does not yet apply to called strikes and balls, though I see no logical reason why replay won't eventually go that far.

The decisions they will change are vital to how baseball works. Let's take the most egregious example of a blown call in recent memory, one that is regularly brought up in this debate: the perfect game that was taken away from Armando Galarraga on June 2, 2010. You can see the call here. Brutal, indeed. But what followed redeemed the brutality. First there was Jim Joyce's devastated apology. "This isn't a call. This is... This is a history call. And I kicked the shit out of it. And there is nobody that feels worse than I do. I take pride in this job, and I kicked the shit out of that, and I took a perfect game away from that kid over there that worked his ass off all night." Even more extraordinary was Galarraga's response to Jim Joyce's apology, a definition of sportsmanship and grace.

You're telling me that that story isn't worth more than just another perfect game? Perfect games get forgotten. That game won't ever be forgotten. Perfect games are statistics. That game is an immense drama of the crooked workings of justice, which reveals important truths about human nature: that our judgment is fallible, and that the right response to our fallibility is to be honest about our failures and to be forgiving of those who make mistakes, even when they fail at the highest stakes. The story showed that Jim Joyce is a lot more than a bad umpire, and Armando Galarraga is a lot more than a great pitcher.

MLB has been clear that video-replay delays will take a little over a minute each, which, they claim, will not distract from the drama of the game. What they don't understand is that blown calls are the drama, or at least part of it, and not the least important part. In real life, we live with the consequences of blown calls all the time, our own and those of others. Now there will "the boys in New York" fixing baseball's. It's fake. It removes an essential part of the sport. And it's a bad reflection of ordinary life. Video replay is the astroturf of justice.